I apologize profusely for the North Carolina General Assembly. Now that they have gerrymandered their way to supermajorities in both houses, Katy bar the door on crazy shit from here. Virginia should build a wall.
It's doubly heartbreaking because it seemed like NC was making such sanity-based progress for a while.
Controlling state legislatures is the one thing that the Democrats as a party don't seem to get. Hardly anything else matters as much in the long run.
At least Montana has scenery and bears. Florida has nothing but humidity and performative assholery.
To be fair, Florida has some exquisite scenery, too.
2: The cities here are super progressive generally, and it will be open war on municipal government. NC politics is about to turn very ugly. Tensions are higher than I have ever seen them.
I pay a few bucks a year for H&R block, and because I'm old enough to remember paper tax filing, I'm grateful for it. The real problem with taxes is that the system is unnecessarily complicated. I should be able to easily handle the annual filing on paper.
When the Texas news went by last night, I thought of you and yours, heebie, as the pit sank in my stomach. How do you think it's hitting your kids to have this happening at home?
(The report from sixth grade in Oakland is that they had a final project on Greek city-states, and Elke and her friends invented a Gayopolis with an anthem "We're so gay, very very gay," system of government some kind of gayocracy, etc, and then when it came time to present it turned out they weren't supposed to invent a city, and everyone else just did presentations on Sparta.)
I do wonder to what degree the sane states are going to be able to mitigate the damage done by the federal government.
And I wonder if the craziness of the crazy states is going to exacerbate the Big Sort -- and therefore worsen the craziness in those states. Quite often, everything looks to me like an unstoppable downward feedback spiral.
"Gayopolis" is what I always called Sparta in my head.
The general gayness of classical Greece, which I think the kids are only dimly aware of, is my favorite thing about that story.
9: They're aware that lawmakers in Texas are anti-trans, but they're not aware of what that means in concrete terms - like that there's a legislative session in progress, what kinds of medical assistance trans kids sometimes use when they hit puberty, and how that's being shut down.
In the very narrow scope of our household, Ace is only in 4th grade, and hasn't given any indication that they are unhappy with their body or nervous about puberty-related changes, and so my best guess at this point is that it we wouldn't be pursuing medical interventions. And that we'd be able to navigate going out of state if that's the right course. And our town is sufficiently progressive that there's balancing forces to generic low-lying homophobic vibes.
For the other 30K transgender kids in Texas, though, I'm extremely worried.
And I wonder if the craziness of the crazy states is going to exacerbate the Big Sort -- and therefore worsen the craziness in those states.
You know how there was a spate of articles last week about how college educated people are fleeing unaffordable big cities? I was musing on that in terms of the Big Sort, and wondering if it would serve as a countervailing force. Certainly Texas and California seem to trade residents like some sort of incestuous VC Andrews novel.
Also the last bit of 9.2 is hilarious.
I believe a conference that I usually go to every year is planning to be in Nashville in 2024, and I am dreading trying to figure out how to deal with that. It's not helped by the fact that it's a.... mainstream group when it comes to gender roles.
I thought that family didn't trade anything, hence the incest.
Maybe they could trade some flowers for the basement or something?
A few years back a friend of mine, working for Booze Allen Hamilton, did an analysis of weather the IRS could write its own tax software and the answer they came up with was, no, its impossible, the government couldn't possibly do that. I think this illustrates why government needs to build its own capacity, so it break free of the Booze Allen Hamiltons of the world.
On a state level, the Parents Bill of Rights is up for a vote today in our very thinly divided House. This is the one that requires teachers to snitch to the parents of any student acting a little too queer.
20: I read 20 quickly, and for a moment I thought it was saying that the government couldn't do weather forecasting and I remembered reading about the guy Trump put in charge of government meteorology that had his own weather forecasting company and so was trying to get the government to stop doing it, and everything was connected, and nothing made any sense.
I'm still angry that weather.gov is not so good that its put all those crappy advertising-driven weather websites out of business. All the data is there, it just needs a decent front-end..... but isn't allowed to have it.
I do wonder to what degree the sane states are going to be able to mitigate the damage done by the federal government.
At least around the trans stuff, I think one avenue for a malicious federal government to immiserate people in sane states is through access to medical care. It's already so onerous for so many people, medications are subject to supply shortages, insurers would love excuses to not cover things, and while I don't know much about health policy I have a feeling that federal action can do a lot to help or hinder.
On the administrative side, there were a number of reforms under Obama and then under Biden to make name/gender changes way easier on passports, Social Security, etc., and I imagine that could also be thrown into reverse gear.
Until I read LKs response in 24, I hadn't realized I'd perfectly misunderstood the quoted sentence. I just figured it was hearkening back to federal damage from the Trump era or something.
WAIT. Now I realize that I just read LK's response too fast, and I guess I did understand all along.
I should really try reading most of the words in a given comment before responding.
You don't have to be better than us.
21: Woohoo! By a House vote of 195-190, the Parents Bill of Rights in NH just got eviscerated and then indefinitely postponed.
I said this last night at dinner, but the thing that worries me about vulnerable Texas kids in particular is their extremely unimpeded access to firearms. I don't know how much specifically anti-suicide activism is possible, or even more particularly anti-gun-suicide activism, but that's the first place I imagined putting energy. That situation seems really fucking bad, sorry to say.
A few years back a friend of mine, working for Booze Allen Hamilton, did an analysis of weather the IRS could write its own tax software and the answer they came up with was, no, its impossible, the government couldn't possibly do that.
Surely it depends on the desired use cases. The IRS couldn't write software for everyone, but it could for people with only reported wage/salary income and some common deductions, and that's a ton of people.
I genuinely can't tell whether public pledges not to blow your brains out would be controversial in Texas, because it would imply at least a nominal constraint on use of arms.
Basically, his opinion was the the IRS couldn't possibly do what TurboTax does so it shouldn't bother to try. Small government!
Shooting other people and waiting for the cops to shoot you an hour later might be the alternative.
I'm still angry that weather.gov is not so good that its put all those crappy advertising-driven weather websites out of business. All the data is there, it just needs a decent front-end..... but isn't allowed to have it.
A major topic of Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk (which I thought was a very nice ode to the idea of government competence)
Yeah, I think that's where I heard about it. An excellent book!
The IRS couldn't write software for everyone
Yeah. If you interact with the rest of the world--pay taxes as a foreign resident, or own a foreign-registered corporation, or own foreign ETFs--things get silly pretty quickly. (This is awful but will never be rectified because overseas Americas collectively have no political power.) But if you don't fall under that scenario, taxes might be complicated but there's nothing intrinsically hard about them. That's why TurboTax can exist in the first place! Calculating the AMT is a pain by hand but trivial for a machine. Before moving I filed our admittedly-not-simple taxes for years by using the IRS's Free Fillable Forms--basically a web forms version of the paper return--always thinking that with a bit more computation support it'd be a breeze.
Anyway, the IRS is great and I'm glad it's being expanded. American tax law has far too many silly and burdensome rules.
36: It's almost radicalizing on that point. Government incompetence is a policy choice, not an immutable fact.
36 37: Yes, I also read that book, and that was what I was thinking about in 22.
38: AIHMHB I use Free Fillable Forms too. The first 5-10 years I used it, it would reject my return the first several times, and I would have to figure out what I did wrong (usually it would be something like I put a comma in a field that would only accept numbers or letters), but the last couple of years my return was accepted on the first try.
I'm the American farmer, so I have to do federal taxes and two states. Also, I know I overpaid this year.
5. Jacksonville just elected a Dem mayor for the first time since Dixiecrats were a thing. Is there a glimmer of hope?
Another impressive thing about the IRS: with actual new funding from Biden, they got call wait times down to 4 minutes this year! And hopefully a ton more rich people are being audited.
9: I wonder how those reports about Sparta compared with Bret Deveraux's dissection of popular myths about Spartan society, from a historian's perspective. CW: Part 1 discusses in part the abusive practices (including sexual abuse) involved in childrearing of Spartan elites - you might want to pre-read that part to decide what warnings, if any, you might want to pass on if you're going to suggest your kid read this. It's really good, but parts of it may be hard to take if you're not prepared. He draws parallels between Spartan childrearing and modern examples of indoctrination into child soldier armies, including the LRA in Uganda.
Bret's a military historian whose main professional focus is on the Roman army during the Republic. He writes a lot about the intersection of history and pop culture on his blog (LoTR, GRRM's misrepresentation of nomadic societies in inventing the Dothraki, why the ships portrayed in Rings of Power wouldn't actually work as efficient sailing ships, and of course, how Sparta is portrayed in 300 vs. reality). Cool stuff if you want to browse it.
44: just to add: he wrote a wonderful series of posts about insurrections, right after the Epiphany Coup. He brought all this history from the many insurrections in Classical Greece, and drew lessons that we could learn from them, for our time.
Still, orc logistics is where the money is.
Speaking of government agencies and forms, I need a renewed passport and the travel.gov pages just hang, nothing loads. But there's a private vendor that for $186 or something like that who will let me use their version of the form. i eventually figured out a way to get the form but it wasn't easy - I could get to a different form's pdf, and if I edited the URL to match the form I wanted, phew, I got there. About 40 minutes of dicking around to get a 1.5 page PDF so I could print it and fill it out.
Does anyone know the turnaround time if you don't pay for expedited service? I have six weeks until I fly.
Topically, apparently today it was decided that Florida is so much of a dystopia that even Disney won't try to force more people to live there.
I got my TSA Precheck, deciding my not getting it was not "showing them" anything. It was a bit odd as bureaucratic experiences go, inside a Staples a few towns over, having a worker without a chair use a tablet-ish device to run my passport, walk me through some button-pressing, and take my picture and payment. Much neoliberal.
I've never been to Florida, nor have I ever claimed to understand Florida, but I feel like I understand it even less than a decade ago. Is everyone moving there already conservative? Do they get radicalized to conservatism after arrival? Is it voter suppression? Gerrymandering? It seems like Florida became a Republican sure thing very quickly after seeming more Republican-leaning for a while. Maybe the surprise is that the vote to restore voting rights to the formerly incarcerated actually won before being gutted.
Virginia and Ohio are the birth states of the most presidents, with eight and seven respectively. All but one of Virginia's were born in the 1700s (Woodrow Wilson, 1856, is the exception) and all of Ohio's were born in the 1800s (and all but Harding between 1800 and the outbreak of the Civil War).
Moby-related, though presumably he already knew: Gerald Ford was born in Omaha.
The UK government has a really well designed, easy to use online tax return system for doing self-assessment. I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be straightforward to do. I use it every year.
The UK has gone to total shit since 2010 in multiple ways that I don't think people are even fully aware of yet, because it's a boiled frog scenario. But, one small countervailing step has been the work that the Government Digital Service has done in terms of putting together a joined up comprehensive digital offering for government services that actually works. DVLA, Passports, Tax, etc. it all mostly just works.
Anything to lay off employees!
52 is correct. Colin Powell (I think) called the US armed forces "a little outpost of Sweden in a country rapidly turning into Brazil", and gov.uk is like a little outpost of Finland or Estonia in a country rapidly turning into, well, Brazil.
I heard the Village People were suing Trump.
50, 55: I don't know there's a definitive answer, but I think it's Heebie's (the bulk of retirees moving to Florida are Republicans from the midwest instead of Democrats from the northeast) plus a collapse in Democratic voting in Miami-Dade (which is I think a combination of ineptitude from the Democratic party, strong and effective outreach from Republicans, and maybe demographic changes as well--more evangelicals, more Venezuelans and Colombians open to right-wing fulminating about socialist Democrats). Here's a piece that agrees with me so it must be right.
47: At this point you should pay for the expedited service if you want to be sure of getting your passport in time.
47: My non-expedited request earlier this year using the website took about 10 weeks--early February to mid-April. So yeah, definitely recommend expedited at this point.
(And the status you could get was completely non-helpful. It was "received" for the whole time until suddenly it was "shipped." (Maybe it briefly changed for a day or so at the end but I was checking pretty frequently. Also the website at some point indicated they were not accepting online applications and at various other times just did not work (never sent the 2-factor code or just hung).
57: Yes, I think these are the main factors. The west coast of Florida in addition to The Villages (and surrounding areas) are mostly privileged, disgruntled Midwesterners. And despite their leaving place like Ohio have also gotten more R. Sigh.
Is it overgeneralizing to say that midwestern boomers are bringing about total armageddon to us all?
more Venezuelans and Colombians open to right-wing fulminating about socialist Democrats
This sometimes perplexes me, in that I would think people with actual experience of socialism - who may legitimately hate it! - would be better placed to see that the right-wing fulminating was garbage. You think *that* is socialism? Bro.
I think many of them were the ones who fulminated right-wing garbage back in their counties of origin.
62: Central Pennsylvania suggests you are too narrow.
47: Other people have already chimed in, it's close enough that you should get it expedited, but this is actually kinda sorta relevant to my job! What was the link that didn't work? Chances are very slim that I can do anything about it, I had an issue of my own when renewing my kid's passport last year and likewise couldn't do anything directly, but I can't help wondering.
57.61: This prompted me to do a little bit of looking at the numbers in key counties in the different parts of Florida and that holds up in part but with some twists. I chose 2000/2004 and 2016/2020 elections to compare and a couple of things stuck out. (And I guess I should probably look at the 2022 debacle as well but mostly stuck with the presidentials).
First, I forgot how badly Bush handled Kerry in 2004-- a bigger percentage margin than Trump/Biden (5% to 4.2%).
Also Miami-Dade was really not that strongly D back then (nor the 90s)-- absolute D margin in Dade in 2020 was still higher than either 2000 or 2004. It was just much worse than 2008-16 (esp. 2016). (However, in 2022 Miami-Dade went DeSantis by 81K and Rubio by 68K).
But you do see the two big Midwest retiree areas (central around The villages etc.) and the SW coast adding several hundred thousand more R margin compared to early 2000s. And in most of those places the R/D percentages were similar, just a*lot* of population growth so bigger raw margins. But those are generally more than offset by urban areas in general becoming more D. But the really big shift is all the rest of Florida which went ~500K more R since the early 2000s. Probably a combo of just increasing R-ification of rural areas and non-East Coast retirees.
45: Bret also wrote a really interesting article about the geographic and economic reasons why the Industrial Revolution started in England, and why Rome was unlikely to have ever developed along that path by itself, even without the fall of the Western Empire: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
63. Lots of people from places that were communist aren't especially interested in US politics. They'll notice that something Democrats say sounds kind of like a slogan from back home, maybe through a filter of people who already live here, and that's the end of it. I definitely know Czechs and Russians who basically thought this way. I haven't tried asking questions of anyone like that I know in the last couple of years. The other occasional template for easy answers for newcomers is religion, same dynamic.
68: Yeah, that was a fascinating set of unmitigated pedantry. I also liked the Fremen mirage.
51.last: There's a sign on the freeway in from the airport.
68: That is interesting and makes me think of the discussion about Brad DeLong's choice of 1870 as the hinge of history (for example: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-thoughtful-and-critical-review ), but I can't decide whether the acoup post would make me inclined to emphasize the 18th Century industrial revolution _more_ (because it represented such a historically unusual transition) or _less_ (because the initial technologies were only useful in a specific niche, and that the more important change was extending them across society).
72: I'd be inclined to put more emphasis on the Industrial Revolution itself. Once the steam engine got to the point of being efficient enough to transport its own fuel economically (via railroads and steamships), the rapid spread of the technology became a lot more inevitable. The tricky, fragile, contingent part was the initial part, where further development through capitalism was dependent on there being a path of incremental efficiency improvements, each of which was individually profitable enough to attract more investment and motivate further improvements. Without that path, we might never get to the point of wider adoption, because you can't use the steam engine in other applications until you can reliably and economically fuel it at scale.
I'm inclined more to Southern Song as the great might-have-been, but I'd have to go back and to some checking.
Song, song of the South. Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth.
The Bursar shrugged. "This pot," he said, peering closely, "is actually quite an old Ming vase."
He waited expectantly.
"Why's it called Ming?" said the Archchancellor, on cue.
The Bursar tapped the pot. It went ming. -- Moving Pictures, p. 145
Just remember what the song says. Keep your mouth shut around sweet potato pie. You don't want to risk getting any in your mouth even by accident.
66: Oddly it probably had something to do with my browser (safari). I couldn't load anything like https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/have-passport/renew.html or other pages near that. Still can't. They'd all load partway but never finish loading. But on chrome tonight I can get through.
Once I figured out my passport was expired I did in fact get it sent off for expedited renewal within the day but I think I sent in a photo that they might reject (dammit) so I guess I'll chase the application with an envelope with a better passport photo and hope that some passport processer will a) take pity on me and b) be able to connect the new photo with the application, check, and expired passport.
Speaking of refugees from communism, there's a new Venezuelan place opening where the gluten-free bakery featured in "Pounding on my Muffin" used to be.
If Trump would have lost in 2016, I could have told kids that subtlety was invented in 2015 and used the video for that song to prove it didn't exist before.
The time stamp is more fucked up than usual?
Whither? Wherefore?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22Judaeo%2DChristian%22&year_start=1850&year_end=2009&corpus=15&smoothing=0
3: MA and Rhode Is,and are a hard lock for Democrats. I do sometimes wonder if we should add an extra party, because it doesn't feel like your vote counts much. 127 Dems 31 Republicans, but a lot of Progressive stuff gets squashed by leadership. And we have no transparency. For example, committee votes in the MA House are secret.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/09/29/massachusetts-ballot-question-house-transparency
For reasons, I don't understand the State Senate is much more Progressive than the House
14: I went to a reunion of people I went to grade school with. It was their high school reunion. One of the women has a daughter going to a liberal college in Ohio. Towards the end of the evening when we went out to a bar and had all been drinking, I asked her if she was concerned about the abortion issue in Ohio. She said she has asked the admissions officer about what woukd happen if her daughter got pregnant and needed an abortion.
The answer was that the school could not do anything but that there were a number of active student groups on campus who would help. Of course, this mother is the type of person who would just have her daughter come home to MA to get an abortion, just like when she helped her get on the pill as soon as she was sexually active. For her daughter, it's still a safe choice to make.
How much are those student groups doing?
83: Without the spaces, it means "Jews for Jesus".